Lamborghini’s one and only Aventador J

Here’s what you probably didn’t know about the conception of this car

On January 14 this year, on a chilly Saturday morning in Sant'Agata Bolognese, a small commune in Nothern Italy, Stephen Winkelmann (CEO ofLamborghini) woke up and checked his monthly planner. Meetings, interviews, production results and shareholder meetings were all part of what he glanced through, we suppose. Then he came across one event that sent a chill down his spine – the Geneva Motor Show 2012 which was only six weeks away and Lamborghini didn’t have a new car to display at one of the biggest auto displays in the world. A frantic call to Aventador’s LP 700-4’s designer Filippo Perini, and by Monday morning Perini had completed the sketch for the Aventador J. An anonymous investor to fund the production (and buy this car) who had approximately 1.75 million pounds to part with in an instant was found, and at the Geneva Motor Show 2012 the car made a spectacular appearance. Of course, we’ve taken a few creative liberties in explaining how this car came to be conceived, but then again one look at it and you’ll realise that it is the stuff of legends.

Two things make this model exceptional. One is its super exclusiveness and the other is the time taken to build it. How exclusive, you ask? Well, if you were driving this car, you’d be the only one in the world. As for the time, it took an impossible six weeks to move from idea to drawing board, into the concept and past the testing phase to transform into a road-ready completely-capable production model. That’s about the time that most supercar manufacturers will take to fuss over the shade of their floor mats.

At the Geneva Motor Show 2011, Lamborghini proudly unveiled their Aventador LP 700-4. Exclusivity wasn’t on the agenda – speed was. This 12-cylinder 6.5-litre 700hp snorting beast was the fastest production car Lamborghini ever built (read our review here). It went into mass production with the aim to become Lamborghini’s flagship model to replace the decade-old Murciélago. As 2011 drew to a close, Lambo spent much of that effort and time selling the LP 700-4… which explains why Winkelmann forgot that the Geneva Motor Show was a few weeks away.

The Aventador J adapted the same V12 from the LP 700-4, but the body was radically different with the windscreen and roof shaved off and the dashboard flowing into the centre console, right between the driver and passenger, and out the back in this two-seater supercar. There are beautiful periscope mirrors on it and a carbon-fibre cross brace in front to deliver stability and rigidity to this mid-engined car.

When the cover was pulled off this one-off piece of art in Geneva, Winkelmann and Perini shrugged and gushed and probably pretended that they knew what they were doing all along and at work for a couple of months. But you now know that their smiles betrayed a very tense past six weeks, where they very nearly screwed up — but, my word, they didn’t.